I don't think Menand was out to be profound, but I found the article interesting and informative. And I enjoyed Jonathan Franzen's story. More interesting than some of the stuff they sometimes run that's "translated from the Azerbaijani," or whatever.
Well, profound was probably an overstatement, but I didn't get much out of it that was particularly interesting. Though maybe because I'm already pretty familiar with those writing programs, and some of the criticisms of them.
I know what you mean about the "translated from ..." stories. I rarely read those. Maybe because for me New Yorker stories are so slice-of-life, their appeal often dependent on the way they illuminate some subtle nuance of culture, that it's better to start from a POV of a shared culture. That said, I have read New Yorker stories by foreign writers that I liked a lot. Sometimes they read like regular New Yorker stories, just set in a different place.
In other New Yorker news, I stumbled across an online reference to an article in the May 18 issue by Jonah Lehrer, the brilliant, seemingly 17-year-old writer and science expert who has been published in a lot of places recently. Somehow I had missed it the first time around, though it's on a subject I've always found interesting: those late-'60s experiments in which a researcher offered little kids one marshmallow, then told the kids he was leaving the room for a few minutes and that they could have a second marshmallow if they did not eat the first one until the researcher returned. Apparently the kids who waited were found, years later, to be much more successful in school, careers, and the rest of life.
Apparently an effort is now underway to contact those same people, now in their 40s, and do more testing.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer
